The present invention relates generally to emergency response systems for providing emergency assistance in response to distress information.
Emergency response systems are generally designed to provide a person (e.g., a victim of a crime) with emergency response, preferably quickly enough to ensure that security personnel are on the scene early enough to stop or otherwise thwart the criminal act.
Millions of security surveillance cameras, sometimes referred to as CCTV (closed-circuit television) cameras, are installed worldwide. Some surveillance cameras are publicly viewable, internet-connected cameras. For simplicity, security surveillance cameras are referred to as a whole as “CCTV cameras”. CCTV cameras are installed to monitor activity, persons or property, and often are used to record or deter criminal or suspicious activities. CCTV cameras are used in both public and private areas. It is well known that many public areas are under surveillance, both domestically in the USA and in other countries such as Britain where some estimate there is at least one CCTV camera for every 32 citizens.
CCTV cameras are often mounted to buildings, poles, ceilings or walls and are positioned to allow the camera to have a ‘view’ of an area to monitor for suspicious or criminal activities. The view range for some CCTV cameras may be altered remotely by exercising the CCTV cameras pan, tilt or zoom capabilities. Other CCTV cameras are fixed-mounted without the capabilities to alter the camera view range or angles.
CCTV cameras may be wireless and communicate by a means such as WIFI, or may be hard-wired by means such as coax or Ethernet cables, which provide connectivity between the camera and a security monitoring control room (SMCR) or station. One example of such a control room is a police dispatch center with equipment such as TVs or monitor screens that may display images or video from the CCTV cameras. A SMCR may have one viewable screen per CCTV camera, to view images or video that is transferred from the camera to display, controller or recording equipment in the SMCR. There are however, typically far fewer display monitors than cameras.
Some SMCRs have large screen monitors that allow viewing 4, 8 or more CCTV imagery on a single screen. Display screens may be controlled and programmed to rotate their views to different CCTV cameras in the field, which results in only a subset of all CCTV cameras available being displayed at any given time. The CCTV camera displays may be controlled by program code or manually to show areas of prime interest or to simulate a virtual patrol walk around the campus or area being monitored.
Often a security officer in a SMCR must manually choose which camera(s) to view on screen. Some methods used to select CCTV camera(s) to view include typing a camera number into a keypad, (e.g., “show CCTV camera #238”) pushing a button on a camera controller-selector device, using voice recognition software, or by moving a cursor on a computer display and selecting the camera(s) to show. The software used to control and manage CCTVs is often referred to as a Video Management System (VMS). A VMS such as those offered by On-Net Surveillance Systems, Inc. of Pearl River, N.Y. (OnSSI), Exacq Technologies, Inc. of Fishers, Ind., Milestone AV Technologies LLC of Savage, Minn. or Genetec, Inc. of Saint-Laurent, Canada, may be utilized to control and manage which camera(s) video feed(s) are displayed.
A VMS can display video feeds from one or more cameras when a person operating the VMS user-interface instructs the VMS to do so, or by other software, to control the VMS by sending text strings or other commands to the VMS Application Programming Interface (API). Some CCTV camera controllers have motion sensors associated with them to cause their imagery to be highlighted or selected when motion occurs. Other systems use artificial intelligence computational methods that may employ pattern recognition to determine “CCTV cameras of interest”.
In many cases, CCTV camera video and images are recorded to tape, disk or other storage mediums for later retrieval, if needed to perform a post-event analysis or investigation of a security-event or crime. Many institutions or organizations have hundreds or thousands of CCTV cameras installed in areas they wish to monitor or protect. The larger the number of CCTV cameras installed by any given organization, the more prohibitively expensive it is to employ a staff of CCTV camera-watcher people to actively study every CCTV camera screen, at all times. In addition to being very expensive, there is a human fatigue factor that may lead to the conclusion that it is impractical to employ humans to watch all possible CCTV cameras at all times. Given the expensive cost to have an employee watch each camera screen, many organizations choose to instead use recorded CCTV camera footage as a post-mortem tool for investigations after an incident has occurred.
CCTV cameras are just one type of security tool that may be deployed to assist witnesses, victims or security personnel to help resolve a criminal or suspicious event. In particular, some criminal response systems rely on a victim traveling to a security office (e.g., an area police station) to report a crime, or rely on emergency response devices such as blue light units that are located throughout a defined area, such as a college campus, or a hospital grounds, or another large place of employment, public access or entertainment that covers a large geographic area. Blue light units may have or be outfitted with sirens, flashing lights, or speakers to bring attention to an area during an incident. Such blue light units require that a victim interact with the unit (e.g., by calling a number or pushing a button or sequence of buttons) to alert a central security office of a criminal act.
Unfortunately, the circumstances of some criminal acts do not provide victims with such an opportunity to run off and interact with a blue light unit. Also, waiting until the perpetrator has left the scene, can result in the victim either not reporting the criminal act (which happens often) or leaving the security personnel with the difficult task of first identifying the perpetrator and then tracking down the perpetrator.
In short, many security systems for defined areas, again such as college campuses, hospitals and other places of employment or public access or entertainment venues that cover a large geographic area, are currently monitored by security cameras, and the systems rely on the cameras to capture a criminal act, and to immediately alert a security person of the criminal act. Unfortunately however, individual cameras in such camera based security systems are either (sometimes unknowingly) not operational or provide such a large amount of information (e.g., dozens or hundreds of monitoring screens) that the security personnel at the security headquarters are unable to effectively monitor all cameras in real time. In this case, the camera based security system provides value, but primarily only in seeking to investigate a criminal or suspicious event after it has occurred.
There is a need therefore, for a security response system that more quickly and effectively responds to an emergency.